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THE BUSH-CHENEY DRUG EMPIRE

[Lead story in the October 24, 2000 issue of "From The
Wilderness"]

by
Michael C. Ruppert

© Copyright 2000, Michael C. Ruppert and "From The
Wilderness" Publications, P.O. Box 6061-350, Sherman
Oaks, CA 91413, 818-788-8791, www.copvcia.com. All
Rights Reserved. - Permission to reprint for
non-profit only is hereby granted as long as proper
sourcing appears. For all other permissions contact
mruppert@copvcia.com.

-----------------------------------

FTW October 24, 2000 - The success of Bush Vice
Presidential running mate Richard Cheney at leading
Halliburton, Inc. to a five year $3.8 billion
"pig-out" on federal contracts and taxpayer-insured
loans is only a partial indicator of what may happen
if the Bush ticket wins in two weeks. A closer look at
available research, including an August 2, 2000 report
by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) at
www.public-i.org, suggests that drug money has played
a role in the successes achieved by Halliburton under
Cheney's tenure as CEO from 1995 to 2000. This is
especially true for Halliburton's most famous
subsidiary, heavy construction and oil giant, Brown
and Root. A deeper look into history reveals that
Brown and Root's past as well as the past of Dick
Cheney himself, connect to the international drug
trade on more than one occasion and in more than one
way.

This June the lead Washington, D.C. attorney for a
major Russian oil company connected in law enforcement
reports to heroin smuggling and also a beneficiary of
US backed loans to pay for Brown and Root contracts in
Russia, held a $2.2 million fund raiser to fill the
already bulging coffers of presidential candidate
George W. Bush. This is not the first time that Brown
and Root has been connected to drugs and the fact is
that this "poster child" of American industry may also
be a key player in Wall Street's efforts to maintain
domination of the half trillion dollar a year global
drug trade and its profits. And Dick Cheney, who has
also come closer to drugs than most suspect, and who
is also Halliburton's largest individual shareholder
($45.5 million), has a vested interest in seeing to it
that Brown and Root's successes continue.

Of all American companies dealing directly with the
U.S. military and providing cover for CIA operations
few firms can match the global presence of this giant
construction powerhouse which employs 20,000 people in
more than 100 countries. Through its sister companies
or joint ventures, Brown and Root can build offshore
oil rigs, drill wells, construct and operate
everything from harbors to pipelines to highways to
nuclear reactors. It can train and arm security forces
and it can now also feed, supply and house armies. One
key beacon of Brown and Root's overwhelming appeal to
agencies like the CIA is that, from its own corporate
web page, it proudly announces that it has received
the contract to dismantle aging Russian nuclear tipped
ICBMs in their silos.

Furthermore, the relationships between key
institutions, players and the Bushes themselves
suggest that under a George "W" administration the
Bush family and its allies may well be able, using
Brown and Root as the operational interface, to
control the drug trade all the way from Medellin to
Moscow.

Originally formed as a heavy construction company to
build dams, Brown and Root grew its operations via
shrewd political contributions to Senate candidate
Lyndon Johnson in 1948. Expanding into the building of
oil platforms, military bases, ports, nuclear
facilities, harbors and tunnels, Brown and Root
virtually underwrote LBJ's political career. It
prospered as a result, making billions on U.S.
Government contracts during the Vietnam War. The
"Austin Chronicle" in an August 28 Op-ed piece
entitled "The Candidate From Brown and Root" labels
Republican Cheney as the political dispenser of Brown
and Root's largesse. According to political campaign
records, during Cheney's five year tenure at
Halliburton the company's political contributions more
than doubled to $1.2 million. Not surprisingly, most
of that money went to Republican candidates.

Independent news service "newsmakingnews.com," also
describes how in 1998, with Cheney as Chairman,
Halliburton spent $8.1 billion to purchase oil
industry equipment and drilling supplier Dresser
Industries. This made Halliburton a corporation that
will have a presence in almost any future oil drilling
operation anywhere in the world. And it also brought
back into the family fold the company that had once
sent a plane - also in 1948 - to fetch the new Yale
Graduate George H.W. Bush, to begin his career in the
Texas oil business. Bush the elder's father,
Prescott, served as a Managing Director for the firm
that once owned Dresser, Brown Bothers Harriman.

It is clear that everywhere there is oil there is
Brown and Root. But increasingly, everywhere there is
war or insurrection there is Brown and Root also. From
Bosnia and Kosovo, to Chechnya, to Rwanda, to Burma,
to Pakistan, to Laos, to Vietnam, to Indonesia, to
Iran to Libya to Mexico to Colombia, Brown and Root's
traditional operations have expanded from heavy
construction to include the provision of logistical
support for the U.S. military. Now, instead of U.S.
Army quartermasters, the world is likely to see Brown
and Root warehouses storing and managing everything
from uniforms to rations to vehicles.

Dramatic expansion of Brown and Root's operations in
Colombia also suggest Bush preparations for a war
inspired feeding frenzy as a part of "Plan Colombia."
This is consistent with moves by former Bush Treasury
Secretary Nicholas Brady to open a joint
Colombian-American investment partnership called
Corfinsura for the financing of major construction
projects with the Colombian Antioquia Syndicate,
headquartered in Medellin. (See FTW June, 00). And
expectations of a ground war in Colombia may explain
why, in a 2000 SEC filing, Brown and Root reported
that in addition to owning more than 800,000 square
feet of warehouse space in Colombia, they also lease
another 122,000 square feet. According to the filing
of the Brown and Root Energy Services Group, the only
other places where the company maintains warehouse
space are in Mexico (525,000 sq. feet), and the U.S.
(38,000) square feet.

According to the web site of Colombia's Foreign
Investment Promotion Agency Brown and Root had no
presence in the country until 1997. What does Brown
and Root, which, according to the AP has made more
than $2 billion supporting and supplying U.S. troops,
know about Colombia that the U.S. public does not?
Why the need for almost a million square feet of
warehouse space that can be transferred from one Brown
and Root operation (energy) to another (military
support) with the stroke of a pen?

DRUGS

As described by the Associated Press, during
"Iran-Contra" Congressman Dick Cheney of the House
Intelligence Committee was a rabid supporter of Marine
Lt. Col. Oliver North. This was in spite of the fact
that North had lied to Cheney in a private 1986 White
House briefing. Oliver North's own diaries and
subsequent investigations by the CIA Inspector General
have irrevocably tied him directly to cocaine
smuggling during the 1980s and the opening of bank
accounts for one firm moving four tons of cocaine a
month. This, however, did not stop Cheney from
actively supporting North's 1994 unsuccessful run for
the U.S. Senate from Virginia just a year before he
took over the reins at Brown and Root's parent
company, Dallas based Halliburton Inc. in 1995.

As the Bush Secretary of Defense during Desert
Shield/Desert Storm (1990-91), Cheney also directed
special operations involving Kurdish rebels in
northern Iran. The Kurds' primary source of income for
more than fifty years has been heroin smuggling from
Afghanistan and Pakistan through Iran, Iraq and
Turkey. Having had some personal experience with Brown
and Root I noted carefully when the Los Angeles Times
observed that on March 22, 1991 that a group of gunmen
burst into the Ankara, Turkey offices of the joint
venture, Vinnell, Brown and Root and assassinated
retired Air Force Chief Master Sergeant John Gandy.

In March of 1991, tens of thousands of Kurdish
refugees, long-time assets of the CIA, were being
massacred by Saddam Hussein in the wake of the Gulf
War. Saddam, seeking to destroy any hopes of a
successful Kurdish revolt, found it easy to kill
thousands of the unwanted Kurds who had fled to the
Turkish border seeking sanctuary. There, Turkish
security forces, trained in part by the Vinnell, Brown
and Root partnership, turned thousands of Kurds back
into certain death. Today, the Vinnell Corporation (a
TRW Company) is, along with the firms MPRI and DynCorp
(FTW June, 00) one of the three pre-eminent private
mercenary corporations in the world. It is also the
dominant entity for the training of security forces
throughout the Middle East. Not surprisingly the
Turkish border regions in question were the primary
transhipment points for heroin, grown in Afghanistan
and Pakistan and destined for the markets of Europe.

A confidential source with intelligence experience in
the region subsequently told me that the Kurds "got
some payback against the folks that used to help them
move their drugs." He openly acknowledged that Brown
and Root and Vinnell both routinely provided NOC or
non-official cover for CIA officers. But I already
knew that.

From 1994 to 1999, during US military intervention in
the Balkans where, according to "The Christian Science
Monitor" and "Jane's Intelligence Review," the Kosovo
Liberation Army controls 70 per cent of the heroin
entering Western Europe, Cheney's Brown and Root made
billions of dollars supplying U.S. troops from vast
facilities in the region. Brown and Root support
operations continue in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia to
this day.

Dick Cheney's footprints have come closer to drugs
than one might suspect. The August Center for Public
Integrity report brought them even closer. It would be
factually correct to say that there is a direct
linkage of Brown and Root facilities - often in remote
and hazardous regions - between every drug producing
region and every drug consuming region in the world.
These coincidences, in and of themselves, do not prove
complicity in the trade. Other facts, however, lead
inescapably in that direction.

A DIRECT DRUG LINK

The CPI report entitled "Cheney Led Halliburton To
Feast at Federal Trough" written by veteran
journalists Knut Royce and Nathaniel Heller describes
how, under five years of Cheney's leadership,
Halliburton, largely through subsidiary Brown and
Root, enjoyed $3.8 billion in federal contracts and
taxpayer insured loans. The loans had been granted by
the Export-Import Bank (EXIM) and the Overseas Private
Investment Corporation (OPIC). According to Ralph
McGehee's "CIA Base ©" both institutions are heavily
infiltrated by the CIA and routinely provide NOC to
its officers.

One of those loans to Russian financial/banking
conglomerate The Alfa Group of Companies contained
$292 million to pay for Brown and Root's contract to
refurbish a Siberian oil field owned by the Russian
Tyumen Oil Company. The Alfa Group completed its 51%
acquisition of Tyumen Oil in what was allegedly a
rigged bidding process in 1998. An official Russian
government report claimed that the Alfa Group's top
executives, oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven
"allegedly participated in the transit of drugs from
Southeast Asia through Russia and into Europe."

These same executives, Fridman and Aven, who
reportedly smuggled the heroin in connection with
Russia's Solntsevo mob family were the same ones who
applied for the EXIM loans that Halliburton's lobbying
later safely secured. As a result Brown and Root's
work in Alfa Tyumen oil fields could continue - and
expand.

After describing how organized criminal interests in
the Alfa Group had allegedly stolen the oil field by
fraud, the CPI story, using official reports from the
FSB (the Russian equivalent of the FBI), oil
companies such as BP-Amoco, former CIA and KGB
officers and press accounts then established a solid
link to Alfa Tyumen and the transportation of heroin.

In 1995 sacks of heroin disguised as sugar were stolen
from a rail container leased by Alfa Echo and sold in
the Siberian town of Khabarovsk. A problem arose when
many residents of the town became "intoxicated" or
"poisoned." The CPI story also stated, "The FSB report
said that within days of the incident, Ministry of
Internal Affairs (MVD) agents conducted raids of Alfa
Eko buildings and found 'drugs and other compromising
documentation.'

"Both reports claim that Alfa Bank has laundered drug
funds from Russian and Colombian drug cartels.

"The FSB document claims that at the end of 1993, a
top Alfa official met with Gilberto Rodriguez
Orejuela, the now imprisoned financial mastermind of
Colombia's notorious Cali cartel, 'to conclude an
agreement about the transfer of money into the Alfa
Bank from offshore zones such as the Bahamas,
Gibraltar and others. The plan was to insert it back
into the Russian economy through the purchase of stock
in Russian companies.

"É He [the former KGB agent] reported that there was
evidence 'regarding [Alfa Bank's] involvement with the
money laundering ofÉ Latin American drug cartels."

It then becomes harder for Cheney and Halliburton to
assert mere coincidence in all of this as CPI reported
that Tyumen's lead Washington attorney James C,
Langdon, Jr. at the firm of Aikin Gump "helped
coordinate a $2.2 million fund raiser for Bush this
June. He then agreed to help recruit 100 lawyers and
lobbyists in the capital to raise $25,000 each for W's
campaign."

The heroin mentioned in the CPI story, originated in
Laos where longtime Bush allies and covert warriors
Richard Armitage and retired CIA ADDO (Associate
Deputy Director of Operations) Ted Shackley have been
repeatedly linked to the drug trade. It then made its
way across Southeast Asia to Vietnam, probably the
port of Haiphong. Then the heroin sailed to Russia's
Pacific port of Valdivostok from whence it
subsequently bounced across Siberia by rail and thence
by truck or rail to Europe, passing through the hands
of Russian Mafia leaders in Chechnya and Azerbaijan.
Chechnya and Azerbaijan are hotbeds of both armed
conflict and oil exploration and Brown and Root has
operations all along this route.

This long, expensive and tortured path was hastily
established, as described by FTW in previous issues,
after President George Bush's personal envoy Richard
Armitage, holding the rank of Ambassador, had traveled
to the former Soviet Union to assist it with its
"economic development" in 1989. The obstacle then to a
more direct, profitable and efficient route from
Afghanistan and Pakistan through Turkey into Europe
was a cohesive Yugoslavian/Serbian government
controlling the Balkans and continuing instability in
the Golden Crescent of Pakistan/Afghanistan. Also,
there was no other way, using heroin from the Golden
Triangle (Burma, Laos and Thailand), to deal with
China and India but to go around them.

It is perhaps not by coincidence again that Cheney and
Armitage share membership in the prestigious Aspen
Institute, an exclusive bi-partisan research think
tank, and also in the U.S. Azerbaijan Chamber of
Commerce. Just last November, in what may be a portent
of things to come, Armitage, played the role of
Secretary of Defense in an practical exercise at the
Council on Foreign Relations where he and Cheney are
also both members. Speculation that the scandal
plagued Armitage, who resigned under a cloud as
Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan
Administration, is W's first choice for Secretary of
Defense next year is widespread.

The Clinton Administration took care of all that
wasted travel for heroin with the 1998 destruction of
Serbia and Kosovo and the installation of the KLA as a
regional power. That opened a direct line from
Afghanistan to Western Europe and Brown and Root was
right in the middle of that too. The Clinton skill at
streamlining drug operations was described in detail
in the May issue of FTW in a story entitled "The
Democratic Party's Presidential Drug Money Pipeline."
That article has since been reprinted in three
countries. The essence of the drug economic lesson was
that by growing opium in Colombia and by smuggling
both cocaine and heroin from Colombia to New York City
through the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico (a
virtual straight line), traditional smuggling routes
could be shortened or even eliminated. This reduced
both risk and cost, increased profits and eliminated
competition.

FTW suspects the hand of Medellin co-founder Carlos
Lehder in this process and it is interesting to note
that Lehder, released from prison under Clinton in
1995, is now active in both the Bahamas and South
America. Lehder was known during the eighties as "The
genius of transportation." I can well imagine a Dick
Cheney, having witnessed the complete restructuring of
the global drug trade in the last eight years, going
to George W and saying, "Look, I know how we can make
it even better." One thing is for certain. As quoted
in the CPI article, one Halliburton Vice President
noted that if the Bush-Cheney ticket was elected, "the
company's government contracts would obviously go
through the roof."

THE DARK PAST

In July of 1977 this writer, then a Los Angeles Police
officer struggled to make sense of a world gone
haywire. In a last ditch effort to salvage a
relationship with my fiancŽe, Nordica Theodora D'Orsay
(Teddy), a CIA contract agent, I had traveled to
find her in New Orleans. On a hastily arranged
vacation, secured with the blessing of my Commanding
Officer, Captain Jesse Brewer of LAPD, I had gone on
my own, unofficially, to avoid the scrutiny of LAPD's
Organized Crime Intelligence Division (OCID).

Starting in the late spring of 1976 Teddy had wanted
me to join her operations from within the ranks of
LAPD. I had refused to get involved with drugs in any
way and everything she mentioned seemed to involve
either heroin or cocaine along with guns that she was
always moving out of the country. The Director of the
CIA then was George Herbert Walker Bush.

Although officially on staff at the LAPD Academy at
the time, I had been unofficially loaned to OCID since
January when Teddy, announcing the start of a new
operation planned in the fall of 1976 had suddenly
disappeared. She left many people, including me,
baffled and twisting in the breeze. The OCID
detectives had been pressuring me hard for information
about her and what I knew of her activities. It was
information I could not give them. Hoping against hope
that I would find some way to understand her
involvement with CIA, LAPD, the royal family of Iran,
the Mafia and drugs I set out alone into eight days of
Dantean revelations that have determined the course
of my life from that day to this.

Arriving in New Orleans in early July, 1977 I found
her living in an apartment across the river in Gretna.
Equipped with scrambler phones, night vision devices
and working from sealed communiquŽs delivered by naval
and air force personnel from nearby Belle Chasse Naval
Air Station, Teddy was involved in something truly
ugly. She was arranging for large quantities of
weapons to be loaded onto ships leaving for Iran. At
the same time she was working with Mafia associates of
New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello to coordinate
the movement of service boats that were bringing large
quantities of heroin into the city. The boats arrived
at Marcello controlled docks, unmolested by even the
New Orleans police she introduced me to, along with
divers, military men, former Green Berets and CIA
personnel.

The service boats were retrieving the heroin from oil
rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, oil rigs in international
waters, oil rigs built and serviced by Brown and Root.
The guns that Teddy monitored, apparently Vietnam era
surplus AK 47s and M16s, were being loaded onto ships
also owned or leased by Brown and Root. And more than
once during the eight days I spent in New Orleans I
met and ate at restaurants with Brown and Root
employees who were boarding those ships and leaving
for Iran within days. Once, while leaving a bar and
apparently having asked the wrong question, I was shot
at in an attempt to scare me off.

Disgusted and heart broken at witnessing my fiancŽe
and my government smuggling drugs, I ended the
relationship. Returning home to LA I made a clean
breast and reported all the activity I had seen,
including the connections to Brown and Root, to LAPD
intelligence officers. They promptly told me that I
was crazy. Forced out of LAPD under threat of death at
the end of 1978, I made complaints to LAPD's Internal
Affairs Division and to the LA office of the FBI under
the command of FBI SAC Ted Gunderson. I and my
attorney wrote to the politicians, the Department of
Justice, the CIA and contacted the L.A. Times. The FBI
and the LAPD said that I was crazy.

According to a 1981 two-part news story in the "Los
Angeles Herald Examiner" it was revealed that The FBI
had taken Teddy into custody and then released her
before classifying their investigation without further
action. Former New Orleans Crime Commissioner Aaron
Cohen told reporter Randall Sullivan that he found my
description of events perfectly plausible after his
thirty years of studying Louisiana's organized crime
operations.

To this day a CIA report prepared as a result of my
complaint remains classified and exempt from release
pursuant to Executive Order of the President in the
interests of national security and because it would
reveal the identities of CIA agents.

On October 26, 1981, in the basement of the West Wing
of the White House, I reported on what I had seen in
New Orleans to my friend and UCLA classmate Craig
Fuller. Craig Fuller went on to become Chief of Staff
to Vice President Bush from 1981 to 1985.

In 1982, then UCLA political science professor Paul
Jabber, filled in many of the pieces in my quest to
understand what I had seen in New Orleans. He was
qualified to do so because he had served as a CIA and
State Department consultant to the Carter
administration. Paul explained that, after a 1975
treaty between the Shah of Iran and Saddam Hussein the
Shah had cut off all overt military support for
Kurdish rebels fighting Saddam from the north of Iraq.
In exchange the Shah had gained access to the Shat
al-Arab waterway so that he could multiply his oil
exports and income. Not wanting to lose a long-term
valuable asset in the Kurds, the CIA had then used
Brown and Root, which operated in both countries and
maintained port facilities in the Persian Gulf and
near Shat al-Arab to rearm the Kurds. The whole
operation had been financed with heroin. Paul was
matter-of-fact about it.

In 1983 Paul Jabber left UCLA to become a Vice
President of Banker's Trust and Chairman of the Middle
East Department of the Council on Foreign Relations.

----------

If one is courageous enough to seek an "operating
system" that theoretically explains what FTW has just
described for you, one need look no further than a
fabulous two-part article in "Le Monde Diplomatique"
in April of this year. The brilliant stories, focusing
heavily on drug capital are titled "Crime, The World's
Biggest Free Enterprise." The brilliant and
penetrating words of authors Christian de Brie and
Jean de Maillard do a better job of explaining the
actual world economic and political situation than
anything that I have ever read.

De Brie writes, "By allowing capital to flow unchecked
from one end of the world to the other, globalization
and abandon of sovereignty have together fostered the
explosive growth of an outlaw financial marketÉ

"It is a coherent system closely linked to the
expansion of modern capitalism and based on an
association of three partners: governments,
transnational corporations and mafias. Business is
business: financial crime is first and foremost a
market, thriving and structured, ruled by supply and
demand.

"Big business complicity and political laisser faire
is the only way that large-scale organized crime can
launder and recycle the fabulous proceeds of its
activities. And the transnationals need the support of
governments and the neutrality of regulatory
authorities in order to consolidate their positions,
increase their profits, withstand and crush the
competition, pull off the "deal of the century" and
finance their illicit operations. Politicians are
directly involved and their ability to intervene
depends on the backing and the funding that keep them
in power. This collusion of interests is an essential
part of the world economy, the oil that keeps the
wheels of capitalism turning."

After confronting CIA Director John Deutch on world
television on November 15, 1996 I was interviewed by
the staffs of both the Senate and House Intelligence
Committees. I prepared written testimony for Senate
Intelligence which I submitted although I was never
called to testify. In every one of those interviews
and in my written testimony and in every lecture since
that time I have told the story of Brown and Root. I
will tell it again at the USC School of International
Relations on December the 8th, 2000 - regardless of
who wins the election.